Our Brain Enjoys Making Friends

GLEICHGERRCHT, E; SALVAREZZA, F; MANES, F

frontiers for young minds

Frontiers Research Foundation

Año: 2013

Is it important to have friends? Why do we enjoy spending time with them? Do we learndifferently around our friends? Neuroscience research is helping us to answer some ofthese questions by looking at the way our brain allows us to, and benefits from, interactingwith other humans. Part of the reason why human brains are so complex is that our interactionswith others are so complex; we are social creatures and have been living in groupsfor thousands of years. Our brain has developed the ability to handle the complexity of thesocial world that our species (human beings) have created. We organize our interactionsinto different levels of complexity: we tell apart our closest family members, we can help ourneighbors, we belong to a nation, and we recognize ourselves as a part of the large world.But why have humans developed such complex social organizations? Interacting with othershas been helpful to us as a species: there is something about cooperating with othersthat made us more fit to survive through evolution (